Airports on the move? The policy mobilities of Singapore Changi Airport at home and abroad

Abstract

Understanding airports as both objects and agents of policymaking, this paper critically examines the policy mobilities of Singapore Changi Airport by exploring its constructions, travels, and consumptions as a ‘model airport’ within and beyond Singapore. The argument presented is twofold. First, a historical approach to policy mobility usefully highlights how contemporary policy flows cannot be understood in isolation from earlier historical travels or reduced to movements triggered primarily by processes of urban neoliberalism. Second, such sensibilities are especially vital when approaching Asian cities where modes of regulation are not straightforwardly neoliberal, but are also underpinned by diverse nationalist imperatives that filter into policymaking motivations. This paper also emphasises the complex path-dependent relationship shared by travelling models and their cities of origin, illustrating how such territorial linkages function to both enable and constrain policy travels, but are nevertheless difficult to detach from travelling models.

Circulating planning ideas from the metropole to the colonies: understanding South Africa's segregated cities through policy mobilities

“…Concepts of 'policy mobilities' (McCann, 2011;McCann & Ward, 2011) can be useful in explaining the extensive efforts to segregate South African cities in the era of British imperialism. Within geography, research into the movement of policy across jurisdictional boundaries has ballooned in recent years, with a host of impressive studies of city planning (Robinson, 2011a), environmentalism (Temenos & McCann, 2012), public engagement (Peck & Theodore, 2015), transport (Wood, 2015a;Bok, 2014) and urban management (Baker et al, 2016). The scholarship identifies the mobility of policy knowledge and models (Freeman, 2012;Peck & Theodore, 2010) via policy actors (Wood, 2014;Prince, 2012;Larner & Laurie, 2010) and their policy organizations (Theodore & Peck, 2011;Saunier, 2001) as well as across sites of learning (Wood, 2015a;McCann & Ward, 2012;Clarke, 2010), interpreting policy as moving both topographically (i.e., via policy actors and their physical travels) and topologically (i.e., through benchmarking, rankings and other comparative urbanism tools).…”

Tourism Unbounded: Mobilities and Border Crossings in Singapore

“…Singapore's Changi Airport is mobile in the sense that the Changi Airport International (CAI) is a global enterprise with an expanding pool of consultancy, construction and management projects around the globe. Over the years, the success of Changi has spawn requests from cities and airports from Brazil, Russia and Fiji, to consult, build, manage, operate their airports, thereby extending and mobilizing the 'Changi model' of service and infrastructure across borders (Bok 2014). How the airport has been mobilized and the consequences of this for Singapore and recipient countries are explored in this paper.…”

“…For mobile capital too, some investment sites are more attractive than others because of local policies, regulations and costs. Mobility is never free, unconstrained, decontextualized and ahistorical (Bok 2014); instead it is always channeled and "moves along routes and conduits often provided by conduits in space. It does not happen evenly over a continuous space like spilt water flowing over a tabletop…."…”

“…Care and sensitivity is exercised to ensure that CAI's investment principles not only expand its investment portfolio but extend the Singapore 'brand name' in an appropriate manner (Bok 2014;Woon 2015). CAI's philosophy is for each overseas airport to be a "vital part of a country's transport infrastructure" and that its growth potential is healthy and beneficial to Singapore's aviation development (Changi Airport 2011).…”

“…In many countries, there are obvious reservations regarding foreign involvement and ownership of critical infrastructure such as airports. CAI's failed partnership with Bharti Enterprises to upgrade Delhi's airport in 2006 and its protracted partnership with Bengal Aerotropolis Private Limited in the case of Durgapur Aerotropolis in 2008 are examples of the highly fraught and politically-charged process of overseas partnerships and investment (see Bok 2014 for details). In as much as Singapore hopes to diversify its service economy in the region, there exists competition by other countries to either expand their own airport services or resist foreign interventions on nationalistic and protectionist grounds.…”